Madness
by teenbibliophile12
Summary: Remus contemplates several types of madness and reminisces about his friendship with Sirius. Set after Sirius's death, but could take place in either OotP or HBP. Not slash. Oneshot.


I'm back, I guess. My profile explains the rest.

Madness

I remember you in the madness you caused, the mischief and mayhem that seemed to follow you wherever you'd go. Your innocent eyes pleaded with teachers so many time, for mercy and salvation from your worst nightmare: detention. But there were worse things than detention, my old friend.

My madness was of a different variety, but you understood it anyway. Perhaps growing up with lunacy of your own, in the crazed ideals of purity and the dogma you were spoon-fed from the cradle, helped you understand my quiet futility, why I did not try to fight harder. I often told myself that my human body was on loan to me, just a loose cage for the monster within. It didn't matter that I was practically scared of my own shadow most of the time, or that I would never place a toe outside the line, because one night per month, I would commit murder and mutilation to even dear friends and family if not forcibly restrained. The monster inside the eleven year-old that was me had taught me hunger and bloodlust, but these emotions I drove to the back of my mind with my own self-loathing.

Perhaps that would have been you, too, after being sorted into Gryffindor and shunned by your entire family, but you were made of stronger stuff than I. You fought their pureblood mania by befriending the son of the most despicable blood traitor family and the son of the poorest half-blood family in England, me. And you fought it out in the open, denouncing your cousins and other Slytherins for their bigoted views, where I hid in my books, flinching if someone merely mentioned the moon. You lived for your Dungbombs and Filibuster's Fireworks while I buried myself in Standard Spells Level One and Fantastic Creatures and Where to Find Them, pranks and spell books our only ways to cope with the insanity.

Maybe it was my quiet nature that intrigued you, so different was I than the others. I only spoke in class and that was to reiterate the answer I memorized by spending hours with my head in our textbooks. Maybe I am being narcissistic, reversing the awe I felt toward you and the boy with the dark, messy hair, but I like to think that something about me was appealing, that eleven-year old pity did not spark our friendship. When you discovered my secret, you did not abandon me, as I was sure you would. You broke the law to help me combat my darkness, and for three more years, I was able to suppress my shame. Together, the four of us reigned in the castle like kings, and we brought levity in times of darkening skies and omens. For seven years, I believed I could scrub the stain of my tainted urges away by surrounding myself, like you, with practical jokes and plotting. Merlin knows, I tried.

And now, what is left of our legacy? The golden boy was struck down alongside his flower that fateful Halloween night and you, his best friend, accused of betraying them. Fourteen years later, you were thrust through the veil by your heavy-eyed cousin who welcomed the madness that you fought so dearly against. I and the rat remain, but we should not. He betrayed the dark-haired boy and his family to his own twisted master, and they died thinking that I had forsaken them. And you, I did not guard carefully enough. I should have seen that your restlessness was growing. You always had a knack for getting yourself into trouble, and as you fell through the arch, your face was frozen with shock that I could not bail you out of death as easily as detention. You, who once whispered to me that your human mother was more of a monster every day of the year than I was once a month. You, who risked life, limb, and love to befriend me and ensure my happiness. But monsters like me, I guess, don't know loyalty to anything more than moon lust.

I failed you in a different way than the rat, and it seems to me that my cowardice was deadlier than his. He learned to embrace his insanity and you fought yours off bravely, but I, forever fleeing instead of fighting, never mastered the reality of having mine. I did not choose to become a monster, but then again, my cowardice, my unwillingness to accept what I am, has allowed me to remain that way in my own eyes.

That too, is a kind of madness.

Please review.


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